Candlestick

In the early 1900s homewares produced in pewter became popular in Britain. Fashionable designs combined expanses of plain pewter with discrete curving organic patterns, evident in these stylish candlesticks. An affordable alternative to silver, pewter also carried associations with ‘old England’ and its renewed popularity was part of a wider Celtic revival in the arts in this period. [1]

The candlesticks were manufactured by Connell & Co. in London who had purchased a number of designs from Liberty & Co. in 1909 for their own pewter range. Liberty’s had led the revival of pewterware in Britain with their extremely successful ‘Tudric’ range, launched in 1901. Connell & Co.’s pewter products featured the use of ceramic tablets instead of coloured enamelwork. [2]

The Andersons purchased these candlesticks from an antique shop in Aldeburgh in 1963, along with a Tudric pewter clock designed by Archibald Knox for Liberty’s. [3]

Lisa Newby, May 2020

[1] Quote from a 1904 lecture by Arthur Lasenby Liberty on ‘Pewter and the Revival of its Use’. See Barbara Morris, Liberty Design (London: Pyramid Books, 1989), p.91.

[2] The Anderson Collection of Art Nouveau, ed. by Amanda Geitner and Emma Hazell (Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2003), p.130.

[3] Alice Millington-Drake, ‘A Love of Collecting: The Andersons and Art Nouveau’ in The Anderson Collection of Art Nouveau, ed. by Amanda Geitner and Emma Hazell (Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2003), p.16.